When I was a kid growing up in Arizona one of the few memories I can recall is visiting the Ahwatukee Arizona “House of the Future” with my Cub Scout group. The house was built in 1979 at a cost $1,200,000 dollars. It was a demonstration for a planned community. It appears to have lost money every year it was sold.

The house was designed by Charles R. Schiffner of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Built over 30 years ago it featured an advanced home automation system with five Motorola 6800 processors linked together. The system was designed by Motorola who was the major employer in Arizona at the time.

It’s important to note that the Ahwatukee home is not a computer controlled home, rather the home permits the tenant to to be in complete control of his environment, making the important decisions which will then be carried out by the microcomputer system.

That’s a quote from Charles E. Thompson, some marketing genius who seems to want to keep people from being scared of the computer controlled house. It’s also worth mentioning that 30 years later, I have been able to reproduce everything that house was capable of for a few thousand dollars and that such home automation capabilities have not yet caught on although the energy saving technologies have.

“As a parent of a senior at Rio Rancho High School, I am in shock to have just found out that my daughter and her boyfriend have been having open sex in the hallway during lunch. Apparently there are no cameras or monitors of any kind! As a concerned parent for the safety of my children, I guess I was more focused on weapons being taken to school, drugs being sold to my children and gangs trying to recruit unsuspecting prey. Never would I have ever thought that sex in the hallway could go unnoticed, especially by staff or students.”

“Why I wouldn’t shake the hand of the Rio Rancho High School principal: My daughter is a blended student and takes a class at Rio Rancho High School. One day she called me in tears to pick her up early. She had been dropped for minor infractions. I tried to talk to Principal Richard VonAncken that Friday but found out he was too busy to talk with me. I went Monday to talk with him. I was never given the courtesy of a phone call; He would not see me on Friday. I learned that my daughter was no longer allowed on Rio Rancho High School’s campus from a police officer. The only paperwork I got was a trespassing warrant. I pay taxes; I served in the armed forces for 23 years. Is this how the schools treat people?”

Improve Safety
Reduction in fatalities, reduction in injuries, reduction in all crash types, reduction in the severity of a crash if it does occur, slower speeds which allow drivers more time to react to a situation, and generally safer for pedestrians because they need only cross one direction of traffic at a time at each approach

The some of the unmoderated comments on KOB.com’s website wanted to know why this was news. Other’s were not accepting the official explanation of a sinus related medical conditon. Here’s a few of my favorites.

I admit to watching Saturday Night Live and while some shows and skits are better than others, I wouldn’t have expected MacGruber to be one of them to be made into a movie.

The MacGuyver parody started being filmed in Albuquerque starting August 31 and stars Will Forte and Kristen Wiig. New Mexico native Val Kilmer will play the villain and no word if Richard Dean Anderson will be in the movie.